Redeeming Time; Shakespeare’s Golden Mean

 

A few years ago I led a seminar at the Newberry Library on the concept of time in works of Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. In my paper tonight I had intended to summarize my ten-week seminar in forty minutes. But the paper turned out to take longer than forty minutes, so I have cut it by two thirds. I will focus instead on a few works of Shakespeare.

 

The concept of time pervades his works. Of his 156 sonnets at least 36 are specifically about the effects of time on love, beauty, friendship and almost every aspect of being human. My late wife, Carolyn, and I came to enjoy the sonnets a few years ago when we took an evening seminar at the University of Chicago. We read the poems together and decided that our favorite is sonnet 73. In it the poet laments ruefully on the daily and seasonal passage of time, which reminds him that his love becomes most keen when he becomes aware that he is about to lose it. I presume that the poem is familiar to many of you, but I beg your indulgence to hear it once more:

 

Sonnet LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

 

In addition to the theme of time in the sonnets, allusions to time recur throughout Shakespeare’s works. Numerous characters in his universe make trenchant, profound or even stupid comments about time. Macbeth’s anguished cry of despair, I presume is familiar to most here this evening.

 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,


To the last syllable of recorded time;


And all our yesterdays have lighted fools


The way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle!


Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,


That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,


And then is heard no more.

It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,


Signifying nothing.

 

Hamlet echoes Macbeth’s despairing feelings about time when he cries:  “The time is out of joint, Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” or his famous, “To be, or not to be” soliloquy:

 

                        there's the respect


            That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,


The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,


The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,


The insolence of office, and the spurns


That patient merit of the unworthy takes,


When he himself might his quietus make

 With a bare bodkin?

 

I could quote numerous passages about time from Shakespeare’s plays, but I cite only one more, which may be the wisest or the most foolish in all his works. That is Polonius’s diagnosis of Hamlet’s madness:

 

to expostulate 
What majesty should be, what duty is, 
Why day is day, night is night, and time is time. Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, 
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, 
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. 
Mad I call it; for, to define true madness, What is it but to be nothing else but mad? 


 

In following Polonius’s council, I have cut my paper from the 40 hours spent on time in my Newberry seminar to forty minutes this evening.

 

I will focus on how time informs not only the content but also the form of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One.  Shakespeare broke the rules, derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics that had guided playwrights from the Greeks through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.  These rules became known as the three classical unities. The unity of action: a play should have one main action with no or few sub-plots. Unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography. Unity of time: the action should take place over no more than 24 hours.

 

Shakespeare apparently was aware of the constriction of the three unities, but he chose to follow his own rules. In the First Folio Edition, published in 1623, his plays are divided into tragedies, comedies and histories. But the comedies and tragedies are set in an historical context in Greece, Rome, Italy and Britain and extend over 28-centuries of history, from the time of legendary Greece before the Trojan War to Shakespeare’s own time. The plays categorized as History plays in the First Folio are those covering the period of English History from the Life and Death of King John in 1216, to the death of King Henry VIII in 1547.

 

Generations of English school children learned their history from Shakespeare. What little I know of English history I have learned from his plays, even though the facts and events in the plays are inaccurate by modern scholarly standards. The plays I am concerned with in this paper are about English history, specifically what is known as the Henriad, comprising Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V. Both the plots and the characters in these plays are shaped by the concept of time. But my focus will be on Henry IV, Part One, which, in my opinion, is the greatest of Shakespeare’s history plays and the most revelatory about his ideas on time. It is also one of the funniest.

 

The first play in the tetralogy covers a brief segment of time at the end of the reign of King Richard II from 1398 to 1400. Richard ruled from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He ascended the throne at age ten, and during his first years as king, government was in the hands of a series of councils. Richard’s dependence on a small number of courtiers caused discontent among the powerful nobles. In 1387 a group of noblemen known as the Lords Appellant took control of government. By 1389 Richard had regained control. Then, in 1397, he took his revenge on the appellants, many of whom were executed or exiled. In 1399, one of the most powerful noblemen, Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, died. John of Gaunt was the father of Henry Bolingbroke, Richard’s cousin, whom Richard had exiled. Bolingbroke deposed Richard and succeeded him as Henry IV.

 

At the time when the action begins Richard is only 31 years old, and many of the peremptory decisions that finally caused his downfall can be attributed to his youth and inexperience. In the first two acts of the play Richard is portrayed as a vacillating, weak monarch corrupted by his councilors and given to making impetuous decisions.  One of those decisions is dramatized in the opening scene of the play.  Richard reveals his flaw when he attempts to settle a dispute between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray by decreeing that they engage in a chivalric trial by combat. When the day of the tournament arrives, Richard abruptly calls off the contest and pronounces his sentence of banishment from England on both the combatants. He banishes Henry Bolingbroke to ten years and then shortly afterwards reduces it to six. With no apparent explanation he sentences Thomas Mowbray, a lesser nobleman, to banishment for life.  This decision plants the seeds that will infect his realm.  While Henry is exiled in France, Richard compounds his initial mistake by confiscating Bolingbroke’s property and wealth and squanders in on his sycophantic councilors.

 

This decision is a fatal mistake, for Henry invaded England in June 1399 with a small force that quickly grew in numbers. He claimed initially that his goal was only to reclaim his patrimony, but it soon became clear that he intended to claim the throne for himself. Meeting little resistance, Bolingbroke deposed Richard and had himself crowned as King Henry IV. He imprisoned Richard and ordered his the execution early the next year.

 

Richard’s flawed decisions result from his ineffectual leadership compounded by a naïve medieval belief in the divine right of kings. When Richard receives the news that Bolingbroke has returned to England with a force to take back his confiscated property, he shrugs off the news as the ineffectual usurpation of a traitor:

 

            So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,

Who all this while hath reveled in the night

Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,

Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,

His treasons will sit blushing in his face,

Not able to endure the sight of day,

But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord:

For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed

To lift steel against our golden crown,

God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,

Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

 

When Richard says “if angels fight/ Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right,” he is ironically speaking about himself. His weakness and indecision is immediately made manifest when the Earl of Salisbury enters with the news that Richard has been wasting his time in Ireland on a fruitless military expedition, while Bolingbroke’s army grows in England.

 

One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,

Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth:

O, call back yesterday, bid time return,

And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!

To-day, to-day, unhappy day, too late,

O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune and thy state:

For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead.

Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispersed and fled.

 

Of all Shakespeare’s kings, Richard is the most poetic, which is one of the causes for his downfall. He would rather describe action in glowing metaphors than act decisively as any king must do. This tendency, and the contrast between Richard and Henry Bolingbroke, becomes unmistakable in the deposition scene in Act III and in what follows in Acts Four and Five.

 

When Richard receives the news of the execution of his three closest councilors, he wails a beautiful but pitiable lament on the fate or kings.

 

Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,

…………………………………………

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;

All murder'd: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king.

 

 

The last act of the play is filled with Richard’s poignant reflections on his reign and the role time has played in his life. In the prison cell where he languishes, waiting for Bolingbroke’s hired henchman, music filters into his consciousness from the outside:

 

Music

 

Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,

When time is broke and no proportion kept!

So is it in the music of men's lives.

And here have I the daintiness of ear

To check time broke in a disordered string;

But for the concord of my state and time

Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;

For now hath time made me his numbering clock:

My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar

Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,

Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,

Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is

Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,

Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans

Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time

Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,

While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.

This music mads me; let it sound no more;

For though it helps madmen to their wits,

In me it seems it will make wise men mad.

Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!

For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard

Is a strange broach in this all-hating world.

 

Henry Bolingbroke, the newly crowned King Henry IV, takes over the realm with a radically different style. Henry is a take-charge workaholic who manages time like a Wall Street CEO.  Yet Henry has a guilty conscience for usurping the throne. In the final scene of the play, Exton, who has murdered Richard in his cell on Henry’s order, enters with Richard’s body in a coffin

 

EXTON

Great king, within this coffin I present

Thy buried fear: herein all breathless lies

The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,

Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.

 

Henry is not pleased. 

 

Exton, I thank thee not; for thou hast wrought

A deed of slander with thy fatal hand

Upon my head and all this famous land.

 

But Exton feebly protests:

 

From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.

 

Henry, however, with consummate chutzpah absolves himself and blames Exton.

 

They love not poison that do poison need,

Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,

I hate the murderer, love him murdered.

The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour,

But neither my good word nor princely favour:

 

In the next play in the Henriad, Henry IV Part One, the newly enthroned King Henry comes on stage fretting about lost time and resolved to carry out his vow to do penance for his murder of Richard by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The time is twelve months after the murder and the conclusion of Richard II.

 

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,

Find we a time for frighted peace to pant,

And breathe short-winded accents of new broils

To be commenced in strands afar remote.

………………………………………….

The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,

No more shall cut his master. Therefore, friends,

As far as to the sepulchre of Christ,

Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross

We are impressed and engaged to fight,

Forthwith a power of English shall we levy;

Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb

 

To chase these pagans in those holy fields

Over whose acres walked those blessed feet

Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd

For our advantage on the bitter cross.

But this our purpose now is twelve month old,

And bootless 'tis to tell you we will go:

 

This is bitterly ironic, for, contrary to Henry’s prophesy that the recent civil war will bring peace to kingdom, it gives way to the new and bloody prolonged War of the Roses. Before the first scene closes, Westmoreland, the King’s closest councilor, arrives with more news that insurrection has broken out in the north with the rebellion of Northumberland and his son, Hotspur. This is a double blow. In addition to the news that Northumberland and his clan are in revolt, he learns that Hotspur has distinguishes himself in the battle and has taken several prisoners. Westmoreland inflames the King with his praise of Hotspur:  it is a conquest for a prince to boast of,” This reminds the King of the wayward behavior of his own son, Prince Hal.

 

KING HENRY IV

Yea, there thou makest me sad and makest me sin

In envy that my Lord Northumberland

Should be the father to so blest a son,

A son who is the theme of honour's tongue;

Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;

Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride:

Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,

See riot and dishonour stain the brow

Of my young Harry. O that it could be proved

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged

In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,

And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!

Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

 

This first scene not only sounds the keynote of time, which will play out in the following five acts, it adumbrates the conflict between Prince Hal and Hotspur and its final solution in Act V at the battle of Shewsberry.

 

Both Henry IV, Part One and Part Two have dual plots; the main plot centers on the civil war between Henry IV and the Percies.  The secondary plot centers on Prince Hal and Falstaff. The unifying element in both plots is the concept time. Whereas time in the main plot in Scene I is fast paced and frantic, time in the subplot is slow and desultory. The lackadaisical attitude toward time is immediately evident at the opening of Scene II.  Prince Hal is entertaining Falstaff in his London apartment about noon where they are nursing hangovers.

 

Falstaff begins the first of their several hilarious exchanges of wit when he asks Hal: “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” Hal regards it as a meaningless question and replies:

 

Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack

and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon

benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to

demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.

What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the

day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes

capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the

signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself

a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no

reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand

the time of the day.

 

Falstaff is undeterred, but he does not deny that he has other more important concerns than to keep track of time. He is a highwayman, and a creature of the night. He says:

 

            Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take

purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not

by Phoebus, he,' that wandering knight so fair.'

…………………………………………………..

Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not

us that are squires of the night's body be called

thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's

foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the

moon; and let men say we be men of good government,

being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and

chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

 

PRINCE HENRY

Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the

fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and

flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is,

by the moon.

 

 

This witty exchange is more significant than it might seem at first. The structure of play is a study in contrasts; a close reading will reveal that most of the action in the subplot takes place at night under the influence of the moon, and the action in the main plot takes place in the daylight under the influence of Phoebus, the sun.  During this exchange between Hal and Falstaff, Poins, the lookout man for the highwaymen enters with the good news that rich travelers are staying in Gadhill on a pilgrimage to Canterbury:

 

But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning, by four

o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are pilgrims going

to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders

riding to London with fat purses: I have vizards

for you all; you have horses for yourselves:

Gadshill lies to-night in Rochester: I have bespoke

supper to-morrow night in Eastcheap: we may do it

as secure as sleep. If you will go, I will stuff

your purses full of crowns; if you will not, tarry

at home and be hanged.

 

It is noteworthy here that Poins is very specific about the hour when the rich travelers will be getting underway “to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill!” And it is also significant that Poins has made reservation for dinner the following night at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap.  He then convinces the Prince to be a part of his scheme to waylay Falstaff and the other thieves after they have robbed the travelers with the promise for more fun the next night at the Boar’s Head Tavern. Poins explains to Hal,

 

The virtue of this jest will be, the

incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will

tell us when we meet at supper

 

At this point Hal delivers a soliloquy that reveals his motives for playing the role of the prodigal son and a significant revelation of the character that is destined to be the future King Henry V.

 

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

If all the year were playing holidays,

To sport would be as tedious as to work;

But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,

And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

So, when this loose behavior I throw off

And pay the debt I never promised,

By how much better than my word I am,

By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;

And like bright metal on a sullen ground,

My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,

Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes

Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;

Redeeming time when men think least I will.

 

“Redeeming time” is the key phrase in this play and in my opinion in all the plays of the Henriad. It is up to Hal to redeem time wasted by King Richard and abused by his father, as well as the time he has wasted playing with his drinking buddies in the tavern. But that transformation can wait. He will in the meantime follow through with Poins’ plot to waylay the travelers.

 

Most interpretations of the motivations of Prince Hal prior to the 20th  century consider him the ideal Renaissance prince and later as Henry V  the most heroic and revered English monarch until Queen Elizabeth.  Much 20th century interpretation, however, cite this soliloquy as evidence of a duplicitous Machiavellian politician.

 

Hal’s attitude toward time is in marked contrast to the other characters in the play. Falstaff has a child-like attitude. He does not much concern himself with the past or future, but only time present. King Henry and Hotspur are his polar opposites. This contrast becomes obvious in the next scene, as the action returns to the palace in London, where Henry has summoned the rebellious Percy clan. As he did in the opening lines of the play the King reveals how little he knows himself. 

 

My blood hath been too cold and temperate,

Unapt to stir at these indignities,

And you have found me; for accordingly

You tread upon my patience: but be sure

I will from henceforth rather be myself,

Mighty and to be feared, than my condition;

Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,

And therefore lost that title of respect

Which the proud soul ne'er pays but to the proud.

 

It is another of the several ironies in the play that the King thinks that his problems have been caused because he is too patient. But his unruly temper incites the temper of Hotspur and to a lesser degree his father, Northumberland, and his uncle, the Earl of Worcester. Hotspur is angry with his father for assisting Bolingbroke in usurping the crown from King Richard.

 

 

Shall it for shame be spoken in these days,

Or fill up chronicles in time to come,

That men of your nobility and power

Did gage them both in an unjust behalf,

As both of you--God pardon it!--have done,

To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,

An plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?

And shall it in more shame be further spoken,

That you are fooled, discarded and shook off

By him for whom these shames ye underwent?

No; yet time serves wherein you may redeem

Your banished honours and restore yourselves

Into the good thoughts of the world again,

Revenge the jeering and disdained contempt

Of this proud king, who studies day and night

To answer all the debt he owes to you

Even with the bloody payment of your deaths:

 

It is noteworthy that Hotspur chooses the same word, “redeem” that Prince Hal uses in the forgoing scene. But whereas Hal vows to redeem time, Hotspur vows to redeem his father’s “banished honors.”

 

Northumberland cannot control Hotspur’s impetuous actions, whereas the King laments that Prince Hal cannot be prodded to act. While his uncle, Worcester goads Hotspur, his father tries to control his excessive concern for honor. His father explains “imagination of some great exploit drives him beyond the bounds of patience.” This remark only sparks Hotspur’s impatience:   

  

Hot.  By heaven methinks it were an easy leap         

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon,     

Or dive into the bottom of the deep,   

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,      

And pluck up drowned honour by the locks;  

So he that doth redeem her thence might wear           

Without corrival all her dignities:

 

As the first act closes, Hotspur calls for action::

 

Uncle, adieu: O! let the hours be short,           

            Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport! 

 

A discussion of Hotspur’s honor invites comparison with Falstaff’s famous soliloquy on honor at the battle of Shewsbury.

Fal.  I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.        

Prince.  Why, thou owest God a death.  [Exit.            

Fal.  ’Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? a word. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. It is insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.  [Exit.

 

The difference between Hotspur and Hal with regard to their attitudes toward time and honor is only one of several attributes that sharply delineate their characters. Aristotle’s definition of virtue is the choice of the golden mean between excess and defect. Prince Hal conforms in almost every respect to what Aristotle describes as the man of practical wisdom. In this play Hotspur and King Henry represent excess, whereas Falstaff represents defect. They represent excess and defect not only with regard to time and honor, but also to at least four others attributes: courage; honesty; sloth; temperance and justice. Courage, for example, if taken to excess, would manifest as recklessness, and if deficient, as cowardice. Falstaff accuses Hal of being a coward, and Hal accuses Falstaff of being a coward. Most critics of the play consider Falstaff both a liar and a coward. And if Falstaff is a coward, what is Hotspur? According to Aristotle courage is a mean between cowardice and recklessness. Falstaff is defective with regard to the mean. He is a coward and avoids death-threatening events whenever confronted. Hotspur is excessive with regard to the mean. He courts danger for the sake of honor. Falstaff differs from Hotspur, however, in that Falstaff is aware of his defect with regard to the mean. When he saved his life at the battle of Shrewsbury by feigning death, he explains. “The better part of valor is discretion, in the which part I have saved my life.”

 

Hotspur’s excess and Falstaff’s defect with deviate from Hal’s golden mean. And this is symbolically revealed in the last act of the play. While Hotspur fights fearlessly for his honor, Northumberland, his father, fails to come to stand against the advancing Bolingbroke forces. Meanwhile Hal is redeeming the time by assembling the King’s citizen army with the help, however pitiable, of his old drinking buddy, Falstaff.

 

The theme of time comes to an ironical conclusion in Act Viv in the final battle scene. When Hal and Hotspur meet on the battlefield. Hotspur boastfully taunts the Prince:

            “Harry; for the hour is come    

            To end the one of us; and would to God        

            Thy name in arms were now as great as mine!           

  

Hal responds:

 

             I’ll make it greater ere I part from thee;          

            And all the budding honours on thy crest       

            I’ll crop, to make a garland for my head.      

 

This response is too much for Hotspur, and he makes one last boast before they fight: “I can no longer brook thy vanities.”  They fight. Douglas reenters to fight with Falstaff, who falls down as if he were dead. Douglas exits and Hotspur is wounded, and falls with his last words recognizing that he has been time’s fool:            

  

O, Harry! thou hast robbed me of my youth.   84

I better brook the loss of brittle life     

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;             

They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:    

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;    88

And time, that takes survey of all the world,  

Must have a stop. O! I could prophesy,           

But that the earthy and cold hand of death    

Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,   92

      And food for—  [Dies.

 

Thus Hotspur dies as time’s fool, while Falstaff falls down feinting death.  Hal emerges as the temperate hero who has followed the mean in his attitude toward time, with the dead Hotspur, lying on one side, and the Falstaff, feigning death on the other.

 

The characterizations in this play are so rich and various that I would go far beyond my time limit to continue making these comparisons. But I would like to spend my remaining time talking about how time informs the structure of the play.

 

In the first scene of Act II in the yard of an inn in Rochester where the travelers are sleeping on the road to Canterbury, two carriers are grooming the horses and preparing the carriage for the journey. The First Carrier comments on the time of the morning: “Heigh-ho! an it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged, and yet our horse not packed.” The Second Carrier then enters complaining that the fleas in the Inn have been biting so fiercely that he has not slept since the first cock. Their conversation continues about the wretched flea ridden condition of the Inn. Then Gadshill  enters as the advance spotter to check on the itinerary of the rich travelers:  “Good morrow, carriers. What's o'clock?” The First Carrier replies,  “I think it be two o'clock.” This response is obviously the Carrier’s attempt to confuse Gadshill, for immediately before Gadshill arrives and asks for the time, the Carrier had vouched that “if it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged.” The Carriers purposefully obscure the time to confuse Gadshill, whose objective is to lay an ambush for the travelers. But Gadshill insistently asks, “what time do you mean to come to London?” But again the Second Carrier gives an ambiguous answer; “Time enough to go to bed with a candle, I warrant.”

 

Some time after four in the morning while darkness still shrouds the action, Falstaff, Gadshill, Bardolf and Peto hijack the travelers while Hal and Poins lay in ambush to take the loot from the looters. As Falstaff and his pals are sharing the loot, the Prince and Poins set upon them, and they all run away. Hal and Poins then set off on a day-long ride to the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap. There they wait to meet Falstaff, and other minions of the night. The action resumes in Act Two, Scene Four. Hal notes that it about midnight and he whiles away the time waiting for Falstaff. As the party gets going they relive the morning’s encounter with the travelers. The Sheriff arrives to apprehend Falstaff.  Hal lies that the fat rouge is not there and asks the Sheriff, “I think it is good morrow. Is it not?” The Sheriff answers, “Indeed, my lord, I think it be two o’clock.” This means that the time elapsed since Gadshill had encountered the Carriers on the road to Rochester is 24 hours. Thus all the action in the sub-plot, which we see on stage, takes place at night, while Falstaff and his minions of the moon are working..

 

In the third act of the play, the main plot and the sub plot merge. The apotheosis of the theme of time occurs appropriately in Act III ii at the center of the structure of the plot. The scene is divided into two parts. In the first part the King rehearses a remarkable lecture explaining his political theory, which betrays his duplicitous character. He begins by scolding Hal for forsaking his royal heritage and associating with the riffraff. The King then boasts of his own exemplary behavior as a young man and how he won the crown. As a young man, he claims that, unlike Hal and his predecessor, King Richard, he maintained a low profile, so that when he came back to England to claim the throne, he appeared "like a comet" to be wondered at.

                                   

After praising his own "sun-like majesty," he berates the showy, ineffectual, King Richard. Then the King weeps. Hal’s laconic reply suggests that his father's words have stung:

 

I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord,

Be more myself.                                                         

 

Hal's brief response spurs his father to pull out all the stops by impugning Hal's manhood and his courage. He compares Hal to Richard, his foppish predecessor, and himself to Hotspur. This response symbolically marks Hal’s emergence as "sun-like majesty," and his redemption of his wasted time:

 

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,

And in the closing of some glorious day

Be bold to tell you that I am your son,                                  

 

The King's reaction to Hal's impassioned vow seals their reconciliation and the defeat of the rebels. The King predicts,

 

A hundred thousand rebels die in this:

Thou shall have charge and sovereign trust herein.   

 

From this point to the end of the play, Hal emerges as the sun from behind the clouds as he had vowed in Act I ii. He now enlists all his drinking buddies, in the King’s forces and issues orders to each of them in the service of the King.

 

Go bear this letter

To my brother John; this to my Lord of Westmoreland.

Go, Poins, to horse, to horse! for thou and I

Have thirty miles to ride ere dinner-time.

Jack, meet me to-morrow in the Temple-hall

At two o'clock in the afternoon:

 

The Prince’s plan to meet Falstaff at two o'clock the next afternoon in the daylight is in sharp juxtaposition with the time lapsed in Act II, from 2 AM on one morning to 2 AM.

 

Because I have run out of time, and I am aware that brevity is the soul of wit, I will try to make a concise summary of how time informs the structure of the play. I point to the occurrences of over 100 references to time in the play and in the opening and the closing of the action of the main plot as well as in several of the acts and scenes. The work of Falstaff and his minions of the moon takes place in a 24 hour period at night, and the action of the King, once Hal has emerged from behind the metaphorical clouds, takes place in 24 hours of sunlight. But more importantly Hal begins his formation as the future King Henry V by learning how to bide his time by following the golden mean.

 

Paper read at Chicago Literary Club,

October 19, 2009

Cliff Dwellers Club,

Chicago, Illinois

 

 

                                                                                                Ed Quattrocchi

                                                                                                1225 Hinman Avenue

                                                                                                Evanston, Illinois 60202

                                                                                                847-475-4653

                                                                                                eocchi@comcast.net